


Things Once Forgotten

by Haberdasher



Category: Elsewhere University (Webcomic)
Genre: Animal Attack, Dogs, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Memory Loss, POV Second Person, Phobias, Recovered Memories, Scars, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 23:29:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20714345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: An Elsewhere University graduate struggles to remember the reason behind a deep-seated phobia of theirs.





	Things Once Forgotten

Your fiancee wanted a dog. That was where it had all began.

On the face of it, her argument was reasonable enough. She’d had dogs all her life up until the year before you two met, when her last one had passed away and she wasn’t sure at the time if she was in a good place to take on another. She was ready for one now, though, and while you’d never had a dog of your own, you were fond of cats, and the two weren’t all that different, the false binary of “dog people” and “cat people” aside. It’d mean going out for walks with the dog now and then, but you liked taking strolls through the neighborhood anyway, and bringing along a companion shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

All of which would be all well and good if you weren’t utterly terrified of dogs.

Your fiancee had persevered. She was determined to get a dog, but also determined to find one that wouldn’t frighten you in the process. She had you meet her parents’ dogs, her friends’ dogs, found the tiniest puppies imaginable at a local shelter and arranged a personal introduction, but big or small, wild or tame, all of them scared the wits out of you just the same.

(Actually, that wasn’t entirely true, as a bit of directed trial-and-error discovered: somehow, it was the little pipsqueak dogs, tiny bundles of fluff and energy that could realistically do you no harm, that freaked you out the most.)

After a few weeks of struggling with the issue, you resorted to meeting with a therapist.

Dr. Stein was a petite lady whose long blonde hair was turning silver with age, her gold-framed glasses making her dark blue eyes stand out that much more. She’d started with a reasonable enough question, the kind you had anticipated her asking: had you always been afraid of dogs, or was there some incident in particular that had been the impetus of your phobia?

The trouble was, you weren’t quite sure what the answer was.

You hadn’t grown up with dogs--your father was deathly allergic to them--but you didn’t remember being afraid of them at a young age, or having any feelings towards them stronger than a combination of idle curiosity and vague worry of having inherited your father’s allergy. But you couldn’t recall exactly when it was that your fear of dogs sprang up, let alone whether there had been a specific incident that had caused it.

You met with Dr. Stein several times more in the following months, went over your life in the hopes of finding some less-than-obvious connection to your phobia that you had overlooked, uncovering a few unsettling facts in the process that only led to more questions instead of the answers you so desperately sought.

First: nobody you could get in touch with remembered you encountering any particular problems with dogs that might have caused your fear; in fact, back in high school you’d became friends with the next door neighbors largely through befriending their large, slobbering hounds, though your visits with them had slowed to a stop after you went off to college.

Second: there are a number of long, dark scar lines across your back, reaching from near your shoulder blades down to your waist; you have absolutely no memory of where these scars came from, but you’re pretty sure you got them either during or after college.

Third: a good chunk of your college life has been reduced to little more than a blur in your memory. You remember bits and pieces, especially when it comes to your actual studies--reading books whose age could be measured in centuries, listening to lectures about those long dead coming from professors who often didn’t sound far off themselves, forming a tight-knit study group with a handful of your fellow history majors--but what you did in your down time, what you did for fun during those four years? You have only brief snippets and vague ideas left of that. Even some of what you _do_ remember seems off a bit--you don’t know what the name of that one professor with the frizzy hair and the freckles and the refreshingly accommodating policy about late work was, but you’re pretty sure it’s neither Taffy nor Toffee, though your memory waffles between the two, and whatever the name of that tall guy in your study group who only ever wore graphic t-shirts and faded jeans, it _definitely_ wasn’t Pineapple Pizza.

The conclusion Dr. Stein reaches, that something happened to you in college that caused your back scars, your fear of dogs, and your lack of memory of your college years, makes sense, given the evidence, but all attempts at unearthing the repressed memories behind your phobia fail miserably. Nothing Dr. Stein says or does helps you remember even the slightest bit about what might have happened to you back in college to make even the smallest of dogs utterly terrify you. For all the progress you make, you might as well have been running headfirst into a brick wall and expecting something other than frustration and pain.

Eventually, you, your fiancee, and Dr. Stein reach an agreement that perhaps the only way to unearth those repressed memories is to go back to your college and see if stepping on campus once again after all these years helps to jog your memory. Elsewhere’s Homecoming is coming up, anyway, and it’s not an unreasonable drive from home. At worst, you burn a little gas money and waste a weekend at an unremarkable college event. At best, you find the missing piece of the puzzle, and all those questions of yours will finally be answered.

Most of the drive is downright mind-numbing, the scenery changing little as the hours pass by, and once you start getting close you’re surprised that Elsewhere University managed to find a foothold and survive for so long while being located in, well, the middle of nowhere, really. You vaguely remember the highway near campus once you turn onto it, but it’s not until you cross onto the campus proper and your fiancee pulls into a school parking lot that you remember anything more significant.

The memories flood you all at once, and you struggle to wade through them, to find what you’re looking for amidst recollections of so many other things.

That professor with the frizzy hair really did go by Taffy--Saltwater Taffy specifically for the first few weeks of her employment, before she decided that the “Saltwater” part was both unwieldy and a bit bolder than she cared to be. She was an Elsewhere alumna, naturally, and well aware of the wide variety of circumstances that could lead to a student having to turn in late work, including those that wouldn’t (and couldn’t) happen at any other university. Taffy wasn’t her _actual_ name, of course, but then, nobody went by their real name at Elsewhere, so she fit in just fine.

That tall guy with a fondness for graphic t-shirts really did go by Pineapple Pizza; he had a nasty combination of food allergies that meant he would never get to taste the stuff himself, but he liked the looks he got for choosing the name, liked how it led to arguments breaking out in his midst as often as not.

And as for what you did for fun while at college?

Well, that study group wasn’t _just_ interested in history, or at least, not the kind of history that could be studied from old books and boring lectures. Your little group devised experiments and deals, ways of gaining knowledge from those who had witnessed things that no human had been alive to see, weighed pros and cons regarding what to learn and how. You were also a Knight, on the side, spending hours upon hours helping other students who had made poor decisions...

...except, of course, for the time when the one who had made a poor decision was yourself.

It had seemed harmless enough, to go pet the dog that was sitting nonchalantly a few feet away from the path you were following, big eyes watching you from that tiny tuft of fur and bones laying there. You missed your neighbors’ hounds, missed your family’s cats, and petting a dog that had wandered onto campus seemed like an innocent enough way of soothing that particular bit of homesickness.

(An ingenious trap, really.)

You hadn’t noticed that the dog was dangerously close to the edge of the forest, hadn’t noticed that its shadow shifted and swayed with the setting sun, hadn’t noticed that both its shadow and its eyes were far too large for the small form it had taken on.

You only stopped approaching the dog upon sinking one hand deep into its fur, which was soft and luscious and thick, far thicker than it should be given how small the dog appeared to be.

It was only then that you realized what you had done, realized what the small and unassuming form of this “dog” actually concealed.

The rest remains a blur even now.

Turning your back on the “dog” and running, sprinting towards campus as if your life depended on it, because you knew it very well might.

Hot breath pressed against your back, and then claws ripping into your flesh, tearing it apart with ease.

A cluster of people gathering around you, one making shoddy salt line after shoddy salt line in the ground before you.

A well-tossed iron chain finally forcing your pursuer to turn away and allowing you to stop moving, sinking into the ground as the pain you had ignored in your terror returned with a vengeance, agony burning into you as you felt warm blood run across your back and your vision faded into nothingness.

You feel your fiancee’s hand brush against your own and recoil, realizing only then how tense you had become, how you had been sitting in silence for some time now.

“So?” your fiancee tentatively asks.

Your initial response is just a single, shaky laugh.

“What is it? Did you remember something?”

You shake your head and say, “Dr. Stein is _never_ going to believe this.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, consider following me on tumblr at [haberdashing](https://haberdashing.tumblr.com/)!


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